Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [201]
The team members drifted idly through the ship, anxiously awaiting whatever might happen. Most congregated around windows, and Kim found Mona in one such location holding forth to Terri and Maurie.
“What happens here,” she was saying, “is that you get a better sense of the sky’s depth. It’s not like Greenway or Earth, where all you see at night are stars and moons, and it could all be just a shell with holes poked in it. Here you look out and you see those clouds and you know they go on forever. It would have to have a radically different impact on a developing civilization.”
“If there were one,” said Maurie.
“That’s right,” said Terri. “And there isn’t. You wouldn’t get any local life-forms out here. Too much UV.”
“It wouldn’t have to be orbiting Alnitak,” said Mona. “It could be parked up there anywhere. Just give it a little distance, and it loses the radiation and keeps the view.”
They were seated in a circle. Kim sank into a chair.
“I wonder,” Maurie said, “what kinds of societies would have developed if Earth had had skies like this?”
“Religious fanatics,” said Kim.
Terri chuckled. “They got that anyhow.”
Mona shook her head. “I’m not sure you’d get religious zealotry under these kinds of conditions. I think it would be easier to see the mechanical aspects of the environment, which aren’t so obvious at home.”
“Kim.” Ali’s voice, from the pilot’s room. “Message for you.”
“On my way,” she said.
When she got there, the heading was onscreen:
TO: GR 717 Karen McCollum
FROM: SOA
SUBJECT: Artifact
Personal for Dr. Brandywine
SOA was the Secretariat for Off-World Affairs. “Run the text, Ali.”
“You can read it in your quarters if you like, Kim.” He looked worried. “Is this their reaction to your dealings with Woodbridge?”
“Probably.” She smiled. “It’s too late for them to do much now. Run it.”
Dr. Brandywine:
If you have the object with you, be aware that failure to deliver it immediately into official hands will result in prosecution. No further warning will be sent.
Talbott Edward
Edward was Woodbridge’s boss. The man who’d given her the Brays Stilwell Award.
“How does he expect us to do that?” asked Ali. “He knows where we are.”
“C.Y.A.”
“I’m not so sure.” His dark eyes were hidden in the half light.
“What else?”
“I think we’ll be having company.” He swung around to face her. “Do you really intend to give the microship back to its owners? Its original owners?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Easy. Once we find them.”
“Tell me how.”
“Just lean out the door and hand it to them.”
“Isn’t that dangerous? These are the same creatures who tried to kill you in the Severin Valley.”
“I think that was an anomaly. I think the thing that got stranded became deranged.”
“I hope they’re not all deranged.”
“They have to be rational, Ali. Or they wouldn’t be out here.”
She heard a sound deep in his throat. “Maybe,” he said. “But that sounds like an epitaph to me.”
They settled into a routine during the first few days, working on individual projects, watching the sensor screens. Maurie and Terri never tired of standing by the windows and looking out at the view. To Kim it seemed as if the emptiness looked back. Gradually the assumptions that had held sway throughout the flight—that contact was virtually inevitable, that the celestials would be waiting anxiously for the appearance of another giant ship—came to seem first unduly optimistic, then doubtful, and finally hopelessly naive. They began to speculate that the opportunity had been lost. Fumbled away by the clumsiness of the first expedition. Kim even overheard some comments that suggested she and Solly might have done better if they’d thought things out a bit.
The current situation, the silence that roared at them from the empty sky, was perceived as somehow her fault. If she had gone to them in January with what she knew instead of coming out here alone, they might have salvaged everything.
She saw it in their eyes, heard it in their voices. And as